One of ASF's long-term
goals is to improve the way we look at the future by encouraging the development
of multidisciplinary educational programs exploring technological forecasting,
futures studies and accelerating change at the undergraduate, professional,
and graduate level. We see this as helpful in at least two broad academic
domains, the first near-term, applications and technology oriented, the
second longer-term, big picture and systems oriented:

1. Acceleration
Studies at the graduate level might reasonably include aspects
of such subjects as forecasting, roadmapping, scenario development, futures
studies, risk management, science and technology studies (infotech, physics,
nanotech, biotech, neuro and cognitive science), productivity metrics,
technology assessment and policy, history of science and technology, cybernetics,
sociology and economics, information science, productivity metrics, engineering
and operations research. In addition to baseline forecasting, this program
would focus on the benefits, choices, and risks of a range of potential
developments in accelerating systems of change, and would necessarily
also consider the emerging sociopolitical and ethical issues of rapidly
increasing technical productivity and machine intelligence. Today's science
and technology studies, operations research, and technology policy graduate
programs offer a useful start toward this kind of curriculum, but need
to become more acceleration-aware.

2. Development
Studies at the graduate level might reasonably include aspects
of such subjects as evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) biology, niche
construction theory, systems biology, astrobiology and astrophysics, complex
systems research, nonlinear mathematics, phase transition theory, hierarchy
theory, catastrophe theory, anthropic theory, theory of computation, engineering,
physical and social science, cybernetics, information and autonomy theory,
philosopy of science and technology, and other disciplines relevant to
modeling the accelerating development of physical domains of change in
a range of universal and local systems. This program would focus on dynamical
models of change in complex systems, including the universe as a complex
system, and would necessarily also consider philosophical and teleological
issues of the meaning and purpose of universal change in relation to current
scientific theory and technical developments at individual, institutional,
national, and global scales. Again, today's complex systems graduate programs
provide a useful start toward this kind of curriculum, but still have
some shortcomings with regard to broadly modeling accelerating change.

A good understanding of science, technology, and social history is vital
to modeling accelerating change, and should be a necessary prerequisite
to graduating methodologically-sound technology consultants and "futurists,"
in the ASF definition. In skimming through much of the futures studies
work since the early and more rigorous efforts of 1970's, it becomes clear
that many futurists in recent decades have been both forecasting-challenged
and science and technology-unaware. Fortunately, there has recently been
a resurgence of higher quality, forecast-supported, science and technology
informed futures work.

Harold Linstone, editor of the journal Technological
Forecasting and Social Change, is one example of the scientifically-grounded
futurist we will need more of to build foresight in coming decades. When
futurists require predictive validity as a basis for their efforts, they
rapidly come to understand that only a special subset of future events
are particularly easily predicted, making them uniquely important to model
and understand, from a policy perspective.

As Stephen
Steele notes, at present there are few futurists engaged in falsifiable
predictions. This is a real shortcoming to our profession, as there are
a host of "developmental" processes we can predict with high
certainty given past history, processes advanced by accelerating technological
change and the economic development such change enables. Such processes
don't revert periodically to baseline, as do so many cyclical or pendular
social changes (market bull/bear cycles, political centralization/decentralization
cycles, etc.), but instead continue to advance more or less steadily,
irrespective of culture. Such obvious trends as increasing globalization,
higher GDP and per capita incomes, more democracy (at least at the national
level), greater informational transparency, less warfare, faster and smarter
computers, and many other less obvious ones, such as the increasing "weightlessness"
of GDP in advanced nations, decreasing world population, and increasing
environmental responsibility and energy efficiency of human society, both
in developed and emerging nations, all appear to be in this class, and
need to be much better understood.

Accelerating change
is something that strategic decisionmakers, mainstream futurists and average
citizens all need to understand better in order to substantially improve
our collective decisionmaking. ASF believes everyone with an interest
in the future needs to work together to help make predictable developmental
processes, enabled by accelerating technological change, much more obvious
to the general public. We will do our part in coming years to advocate
for statistically-backed prediction as a core futurist methodology.